$ 55 Million for Palestine’s Private Sector

While the international media has been highlighting the acute financial crisis facing the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, Palestine’s donors have been quietly, behind the scenes, shifting their focus to promoting the private sector. While their new priorities do not exclude immediate cash transfers to the ailing interim government in the occupied territorites to prevent its collapse, their latest funding programmes, which include $55 million from the World Bank and its affiliates over the next two years, emphasise the vital role that private companies and employers could play in helping to reduce Palestine’s dependence on foreign aid, and in creating jobs.

The Minister of Economy, Jawad Naji, is working with the World Bank to promote Palestinian companies and Palestine’s international competitiveness. Photograph: Palestine News Network.

PalTrade Launches Drive to Diversify Trade & Exports

The Palestine Trade Center (PalTrade), together with the Ministry of Economy in Ramallah, has announced a series of measures to promote Palestinian exports to the Arab countries, Europe and other international markets, including special programmes aimed at small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the West Bank and Gaza. They are being launched as more and more countries, following the lead of the UK, the European Union and South Africa, are refusing to accept imports labelled ‘Made in Israel,’ which, in fact, come from Israeli settlements in the occupied territories rather than from Israel itself.

The measures announced by PalTrade — a national, non-profit organisation based in Al Bireh in the West Bank — include a new trade diversification programme funded by the EU which is also being supported by the Palestinian Shippers Council. In addition to encouraging alternative trade corridors to, and through, Jordan and the nearby Arab countries, the €3 million programme sets up a ‘National Export Strategy’ to improve Palestine’s international competitiveness as well as special measures to develop Palestine’s trade in services.

Medjool dates and Palestinian fruits and vegetables from the Jordan Valley are prized throughout the Arab world. Picture courtesy of PalTrade.

Jordan and the Arab Gulf states are being targetted by PalTrade and the new Jericho Agro-Industrial Park. Picture courtesy of PalTrade.

“A comprehensive package will be implemented to support the private sector in reaching new markets and developing marketing strategies,” the EU’s chief representative, John Gatt-Rutter, said at the official launch in Ramallah’s Movenpick Hotel on 27 February.
However, he also noted that its success depended on Israel complying with its international obligations to remove the existing barriers to the free movement of people, goods and services in the territories. “For this project to fully deliver its results…Israel has a major responsibility for ensuring access and movement and facilitating Palestinian trade,” he told his audience, which included Prime Minister Salah Fayyad, PalTrade’s CEO, Hanan Taha, and Maha Abu Shoshah, Chairman of the Shippers Council.

Last September, the European Parliament in Strassbourg approved a new trade agreement with the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem which allows EU members states to import agricultural products, including fish, directly, i.e. without going through Israel. “This is one of the most generous trade agreements in the agricultural sector signed by the EU,” the European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, Dacian Ciolos, said at the time. “I want to be clear,” he added, that the European Commission is working to ensure that the EU does not buy any products from Israeli colonies in the occupied Palestinian territories.”

Solar Energy & Water: Japan Shows the Way

The construction of new power and water plants, never mind wastewater schemes, may not be glamorous, but it is vital to the development of any country, especially one like Palestine whose people are struggling with living under occupation as well as with a lack of finance. When such projects are linked to sustainability and the use of low-maintenance, renewable energy sources, they can do even more to promote what the Japan International Co-operation Agency (JICA) –Japan’s foreign aid organisation– calls “human security.” And that’s something that could benefit Palestinians living in Jordan and the neighbouring countries, as well in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
A Japanese engineer supervising the installation of solar panels at the Jericho Agro-Industrial Park.

At first glance, the construction site for a new solar electricity generation system just outside Jericho in the West Bank looks like a low-lying maze of horizontal steel beams stretching across an otherwise empty tract of sand to the administrative buildings of a new industrial zone – JAIP – that JICA is building nearby. (See Jericho Agro-Industrial Park, below.) But, if all goes well, by next year it should be providing much-needed power for Jericho city, as well as for the new factories in the Park.

Jericho Agro-Industrial Park: Bringing State-of-the-Art Industry to the World’s Oldest City

Jericho is reputedly the world’s most ancient, continuously inhabited city, its fortified walls dating back 10,000 years. Today it is a haven of self-rule in central Palestine and a mecca for residents in the West Bank seeking a respite from their political and economic woes, as well as for some 700,000 tourists a year who visit the area’s famed biblical and Islamic sites.

But on a 10-minute drive out-of-town, the vibrant streets, palm trees and market stalls filled with the lush produce of the Jordan Valley give way to the desert. It’s hard to believe that in the space of a few months, 11.5 hectares of rocky soil and flat, dry terrain will give way to an industrial zone of processing plants and modern factories capable of exporting the region’s high quality agricultural products to nearby Jordan and onward to lucrative markets in the Arab Gulf states and the European Union.

It is just one of three such zones—along with others in Bethlehem and Jenin—planned by the Palestinian Industrial Estates and Free Zones Authority (PIEFZA) to help increase jobs and opportunities for small- and medium-sized enterprises, as well as export earnings. If successful—and there are many “ifs” given Israel’s control of the surrounding region, the pioneering Jericho project, known as the Jericho Agro-Industrial Park (JAIP), could prove to be a boon to private and foreign investment, particularly from Palestinian and Arab entrepreneurs in the diaspora.